


Animal Memery

by mellonbread



Category: Brigador (Video Game)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Concussions, Death, Gen, War, War Crimes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-14
Updated: 2018-10-14
Packaged: 2019-08-02 07:13:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16300478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mellonbread/pseuds/mellonbread
Summary: Johnny Five aces joins in the effort to liberate Solo Nobre, and rapidly discovers that liberating himself will be more of a problem than he anticipated.





	1. Chapter 1

Imagine four balls on the edge of a cliff. Say a direct copy of the ball nearest the cliff is sent to the back of the line of balls and takes the place of the first ball. The formerly first ball becomes the second, the second becomes the third, and the fourth falls off the cliff.

Johnny Five Aces’ bladder worked the same way.

The way his stream scattered, then tightened into a straight line reminded him of the big spacer lasers. The dark bathroom was only dimly lit through the blackout curtains by the enormous neon sign, and the afterimages of the beams still danced on his retinas in the dark. Transfixed, he stood insensate just long enough for his swagerette to fall out of his mouth and into the toilet.

Johnny swore. It briefly occurred to him that hiding out in an overnight room above a Tip of the Tail wasn’t the brightest idea. He’d seen enough strip joints, brothels and all-nite liquor stores mulched in the last six hours of fighting that a smarter man would have had serious doubts about waiting out the remainder of the three-way civil war in one. A series of low concussions in the distance drove the point home, illuminating the room for a moment in dull oranges, purples and reds.

Johnny clutched his head, assuming the flashes and the pounding were merely the results of his hangover. And a less than amicable disconnection from his Fence. His Fence, which was now street parked somewhere outside, for anyone to just hop on and walk off with. The back of his head tingled. Maybe “jack itch” or another one of those rashes you got when you didn’t sterilize the port properly. Or so the techs told him.

He pondered going downstairs for another vodka and vodka. Or two. But another encounter with the barkeep was a dicey proposition, what with his little cash flow problem. Somehow, nobody seemed to think his credit was any good. Even with the boundless riches that the SNC would no doubt be sending his way, for the destruction of what he was positive had been a Corvid fuel dump.

(Unbeknownst to him, he’d already drunkenly promised most of the contract’s hypothetical payout to the pudgy hooker snoring soundly between the crusty, velveteen sheets of the bed)

His assault on the supply cache had been nothing short of sheer brilliance. So much that he felt compelled to mentally congratulate himself yet again on his masterful strategy: The way the teal-helmet he pulled from the wrecked van had skillfully concealed his face and masked his voice. The way he had ingeniously disguised his terrified and incoherent mumbling as a perfect imitation of the anarchist argot. The way he had made sure none of them were looking before pouring round after round of 84mm HE into the most important looking building he could see. Then, scooting away on the Fence’s two dinky legs before they could catch him. It had only taken him three blocks to realize he was facing backwards as he ran.

“Cyber hard”, he thought to himself.

The wall of the hotel room fell away in a flash of light. Before he realized what was happening, the concussion sent his vision spinning and his ears roaring as he tumbled into the night.


	2. Best Ploid in Solo Nobre

Ozma’s head, which was all of him, floated in a sealed vat of control brine, rich with oxygen and memory enhancing nootropics. The vat of control brine sat in an armored blister on the hull of his powersuit. Free from the constraints of anthropomorphic design, cephaloid powersuits could take on any form the designer pleased. Ozma’s Alzabo took the form of an armored brittle star, which scuttled along the streets of Solo Nobre. On four legs, then nine, then five. Ozma loved the Alzabo. He loved changing its configuration and sleeving into an entirely new body - exploring and learning new functions. But more than that, he loved what he was sent to do in it.

Ozma was not a combatant in the same way as his brother and sister heads, ensconced in war machines the size of city blocks. He stalked the streets alone in a mechanical spider scarcely larger than a child. In search of human intelligence - of a kind far more visceral than what one could gather conversing with the painfully slow witted surface dwellers.

The Alzabo’s bread slicer could peel a brain inside of two minutes, paralyzing Ozma’s auxiliary processing lobes with a rush of delicious thoughts. He’d spent the last six hours scuttling around back alleys, looking for particularly important cortexes to slurp up. The best he had found so far was an NEP Colonel, half smeared across a wall by a suicide bombing he’d arrived just too late to witness. Her gray matter was practically soup by the time he peeled it, but he’d recovered her control code intact. One or two of his siblings would successfully dupe the dirt eaters’ central command thanks to him.

Something told him that this man, bruised and unconscious and naked save for a set of well worn boxer-briefs, would be important. His transducers could practically smell the well worn cortical jack in the back of his skull. Ozma would plug into the socket with an interface cable before peeling this victim. Would torment him with ghost images and thirteen phantom spidery limbs before feeding. The taste of the man’s concussion and confused fear would be sweet, making the back of his jaw sting where it met his skull. Like a ripe purple raspberry bursting on Ozma’s tongue.

He dragged the man into an alcove in the mostly-destroyed facade of the hotel. Crouching over him, he extended the interface plug from one of his manipulators, peeled back the dust cover, and inserted the probe into the socket on the back of the man’s head.

At first, Ozma thought the feedback was some kind of hardware incompatibility. He tried to flex the interface plug like a lockpick, forming what he assumed was the appropriate dongle to spoof the man’s jack into letting him in.

He couldn’t move the plug at all. Something was wrong. 

Really wrong.

Some hardware or software problem with the man’s interface had caused a memory leak in the Alzabo’s systems, devoting more and more of its scarce disc space to the task of opening a connection with the victim’s brain. Ozma frantically cursed himself for vainly devoting so much computing power to extra limbs he didn’t need. Not when whatever incredibly sophisticated defenses his would-be-victim’s brain possessed were forcing his systems to cannibalize themselves. Not when he couldn’t scrape together enough RAM to keep his lyfe supphfortt cyftemzz nad ro efhen hhizz langwhagee profhesshing funckchon-

 

Johnny Five Aces screamed. He was lying face down on the pavement, naked, with a large robot spider pressing down on the back of his neck. He could feel it on him and he could feel himself below it, joined together through his cranial jack. The spider thrashed and Johnny thrashed and screamed again, until the thing spasmed hard and sprung away from him. Body pounding with confused fear and fresh DC shock, Johnny scooted away from the thing as fast as he could. He hit a wall. The robot didn’t seem interested in him. Didn’t seem to notice anything happening around it at all. It twitched and flailed and it curled up like someone just doused it with raid. Johnny wedged himself beneath a fallen support pillar and waited for the world to stop trying to kill him.

When the tingling and the heart palpitations and the sheer animal fear subsided, Johnny crawled back out into the world. It was just cool enough that he wished he’d been thrown clear of the blast in something warmer than his underwear. And something softer too - several bones ached as though he’d come just shy of breaking them. His wallet, weapon and smokes were nowhere to be seen.

He looked at his assailant. It was painted a dull blood-orange, with checkered markings and writing in a language he couldn’t read. Clearly the thing had tried to hack his brain. And even in his sleep, he had still outsmarted it. God damn, he was good.

Now all he needed were clothes, money, a weapon, a vehicle, and a way off this planet.


	3. Tight Bodies and Cheap Meat

Everything was turning up Johnny. He had found a body in an alleyway whose unisex raincoat fit him like an outsized yellow rubber glove. The corpse’s wallet had even held a few notes of scrip, Great Leader and Etim’s faces stained slightly by their former owner’s leaking viscera. In truth, the coat was also a bit worse for wear. It had a couple conspicuous holes, and the thin sheen of blood across the lens gave the flashlight beam a red tint. Still, it beat running around in only his briefs.

Now, Johnny took inventory of his current disposition, comparing it to the list of items he consciously decided to seek out after his fortunate encounter with the Spacer bug-bot. He was in possession of:

[v] Clothes  
[v] Money  
[_] A Weapon  
[_] A Vehicle  
[_] A Way Off Solo Nobre

Two out of five, found only minutes after mentally compiling his itinerary. Surely, the other three would come just as easily.

Hearing well and truly scrambled by the shell that tossed him out of his hotel room, Johnny almost ran into the leg of the patrolling Swede.

 

2nd Lt. Esme Parkreiner stomped. She stomped and kicked and stomped again. The cooling system was working overdrive, and even with the straps, the rocking motion risked cooking her on the overheated walls of the tiny cockpit. Every Swede pilot tried running the damn thing in the buff at some point, thinking it would at least be cleaner than sweating through jacksuit and underwear. But almost every surface in the crew compartment got so hot that any exposed skin was at serious risk of scalding.

Esme was stomping because she had outdistanced her supporting infantry, and something was moving around at foot level. Any civilian would know better than to dart between a mech's legs in the middle of a warzone, leaving only the possibility of a corvid bomber. You could sometimes set off their charges from a distance if you hit the ground right - the explosive mixture was nominally stable, but when armed the electronics on the detonator were usually shoddy enough that a good jolt would set them off prematurely. In the absence of her mog cover (who, most likely, had deliberately abandoned her rather than accompany the Butcher of Saint Nara Elementary into battle), and with Bone Machine kitted out for long range fire support rather than point defense, her legs were her best asset at keeping any would-be martyrs from explosively popping the toes off her ride.

 

Johnny screamed and ran. The world was exploding around him in a maelstrom of pounding pistons and cracked macadam, and he wanted to get off. The coat flapped and the flashlight (which it didn't occur to him to switch off) bounced wildly. The pair of boots pinched his toes and flopped around his ankles in equal measure, threatening to fly off with the frantic pounding of his overly-wide feet. Eyes night-blinded by neon signs and the lingering discharge of energy weapons that seemed to be coming from everywhere, Johnny ran toward the only thing that could possibly have been more dangerous than the Swede.

 

Satisfied that the threat underfoot had been squashed into the pavement, Esme set her sights (figuratively and literally) on the threat at hand: the Spacer heavy in the next neighborhood over. Its "torso", the shape and size of a grain silo, was visible over the rooftops and between high rise buildings as it stumbled through a shower of rockets, bomblets and other projectiles exploding around it. Esme licked her lips and wished she had something to eat. A double cheeseburger, fries and a cola with plenty of pilfered aguardiente added to give it the licorice taste she couldn't get out of her head. All she could think about was getting to Eds after her shift ended. As if there was a shift to end. As if there would still be an Eds.

The pillar-mech's shield popped in a shower of chaff.

Esme fired the Bishop. A 140mm round designed to pluck starships from the sky streaked forward and hit the Spacer mech dead center.

 

Gribbald Farquad was not, all things told, having a good day. Thinking the dirt eaters little match for the might of his Usul, he had confidently stomped forward, discharging his enormous beam emitters, slicing buildings in twain, laughing as the dirt eater weapons failed to pierce the hardshields that ensconced his mech, just as the bubble of warm gray slime ensconced his body. He wasn't laughing now. His shields had been disabled by some form of incredibly sophisticated countermeasure - clearly some unscrupulous merchant had sold these primitives weaponry far beyond what they themselves could have built. To make matters worse, something had just put an enormous hole clean through his mech. The thin sheen of spacer alloys had not only failed to stop the projectile on the way in, it had also failed to stop it on the way out. A small blessing, certainly, but an indignity which someone of his station should never have had to suffer.

 

Johhny saw no reason to stop running. He saw no indication that this was a safe place to stop. He had trouble forming thoughts besides ohfuckohfuckohfucknononopleasenonofuckno. He knocked over a fruitstand as he wheeled around the corner, barely staying ahead of the ten story blood-orange mech's dainty legs. Not even thinking, he dove for an alley, hoping the thing would continue on its way.

 

Gribbald turned to view his assailant. He could barely see anything, sensors nearly scrambled by the shower of aluminum scraps bursting around him. But the signature of the dirt-eater heavy was unmistakable. He turned, slowly, to face it. The Usul groaned, too much shielding, cooling and power supply now being carried by too little support structure. He had to make sure he didn't turn too fast, or the stress of the movement could cause the whole thing to collapse on itself. Just laser the dirt eater who shot him, and back to the shuttle, honor having been satisfied. He stepped forward, to secure his footing for the shot, and-

 

Esme saw the spacer mech go down, as though one of its legs had slipped out from under it. Weren't these things supposed to have self righting stabilizers, years in advance of any Colonial tech? She advanced to a firing position, fearing a trick, still dreaming of greasy fast food. The thing wasn't moving. The impact alone had nearly leveled several of the surrounding structures. She wondered if it was worth leveling the ones still standing, potentially wasting one of her five remaining rounds for the Bishop on a confirmation kill. She stopped wondering and took the shot.

 

Johnny hadn't heard anything explode in a good thirty seconds. He peered out of the alleyway, hoping that the crashing sound and the shaking of the pavement were both indicators of a personal shuttle, deposited in the street by a grateful SNC who, in recognition of his greatness, was prepared to ferry him off this horrible planet fare free, no questions asked.

The street in front of him exploded.


End file.
